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The new proposal for regulating the European Internal Market for Electricity (EIME) can motivate the harmonization of the various National markets. The process of harmonizing the day-ahead markets (DAMs) is at an advanced stage, with an efficiency in the use of interconnectors of 86%. However, the harmonization of both intraday (IDMs) and balancing markets (BMs) is still in its infancy, with an efficiency in the use of interconnectors of 50 and 19%, respectively. The new proposal brings new targets to DAMs, and European countries should make efforts to comply with them. The same is true for IDMs and BMs, but involving more ambitious targets, requiring higher efforts to be accomplished. Both the analysis of the various National markets (according to their compliance with the new proposal for regulating the EIME) and the advantages of the new proposal for key market participants (particularly, consumers, variable renewable generation, and conventional generation) are presented. The analysis indicates that the proposal contributes to a potential increase of the general welfare of market participants. However, some aspects of the proposal can negatively affect the revenue obtained from the National markets, notably for variable renewable generation and conventional generation.

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At present, a harmonized pan-European electricity market (EM) is a close reality. While in day-ahead markets (DAMs) the harmonization is at an advanced stage, in balancing markets (BMs) still exist some challenging issues, notably the remuneration of imbalances: some countries have simple and clear methods, but others consider complex methods that are not appealing to the participation of variable renewable energy (VRE). The participation of VRE in BMs is technically feasible, although with some restrictions to guarantee security and stability. Thus the economic attractiveness of these markets should be increased in order to enable full integration of VRE without feed-in-tariffs or other incentives. This article presents an overview of EMs, focusing on European BMs, and also investigates the benefits of the participation of wind power producers (WPPs) in BMs at both economic and technical levels. In particular, the article presents a new strategy allowing WPPs to bid in BMs. It also presents a study involving four scenarios, where WPPs participate in: (a) the DAM (baseline scenario), (b) the DAM and the automatic-activated frequency restoration reserve market, (c) the DAM and the manually activated FRR (mFRR) market, and (d) the DAM and a 15-min mFRR market. The simulations are performed with the agent-based system MATREM (for Multi-Agent TRading in EMs). For the last scenario, the results indicate an increase around 6% in the wind energy value to the market, a decrease of 12% in the total reserve used, and a decrease around 16% in the costs from the BM.

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Understanding the spatiotemporal complementarity of wind and solar power generation and their combined capability to meet the demand of electricity is a crucial step towards increasing their share in power systems without neglecting neither the security of supply nor the overall cost efficiency of the power system operation. This work proposes a methodology to exploit the complementarity of the wind and solar primary resources and electricity demand in planning the expansion of electric power systems. Scenarios that exploit the strategic combined deployment of wind and solar power against scenarios based only on the development of an individual renewable power source are compared and analysed. For each scenario of the power system development, the characterization of the additional power capacity, typical daily profile, extreme values, and energy deficit are assessed. The method is applied to a Portuguese case study and results show that coupled scenarios based on the strategic combined development of wind and solar generation provide a more sustainable way to increase the share of variable renewables into the power system (up to 68% for an annual energy exceedance of 10% for the renewable generation) when compared to scenarios based on an individual renewable power source. Combined development also enables to reduce the overall variability and extreme values of a power system net load.